Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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As a longtime NWW fan, the prospect of an ambitious, long-gestating triple LP release entitled Trippin’ Musik naturally filled me with glee and anticipation, as I envisioned another Soliloquy For Lilith-level classic. That enthusiasm remained undampened by the jabbering and splattering loop lunacy of Experimente II: Son of Trippin’ Music, as it seemed like that was intended as more of an outtake collection than a teasing glimpse of what was to come. As it turns out, however, it was very much the latter, as Trippin' Musik is often an obsessively loop-driven affair that basically expands upon Experimente II rather than transcending it. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but Trippin’ Musik is occasionally surprising in both its extremity and single-mindedness. This is a bizarre and challenging album even by Nurse With Wound standards.
A strong case could be made that the vinyl version of Trippin’ Musik is the logical culmination of several conceptual threads that have always driven Steven Stapleton's work, as it combines a lavish visual presentation with a playfully twisted and enigmatic "hall of mirrors" approach to the actual music.It is both an art object and a kind of surrealist game of chance: some songs are weirdly beautiful and immersive, while others are grinding, one-dimensional endurance tests.None of the songs or records are numbered or identified, so the album's sequence is dictated entirely by the choices of the listener (and those choices will unavoidably be blind ones at first).The newly issued CD version, on the other hand, offers a significantly altered and enhanced version of the Trippin’ Musik experience, as there are actual song titles and an ostensible sequence.I definitely appreciate the former and I also quite like the digital format, as using the "shuffle" feature enables probability to dictate the sequence rather than my own vague memories of which colored record I liked the most.I also like the clarity of the digital version, as some of the nuance and detail is definitely lost in the omnipresent crackle and hiss of my record player.The differences between the two formats go much deeper than that, however, as the CD version throws in roughly 35 minutes of new material and excises almost half of the material from the pink record (basically 15 minutes of rhythmic metallic scraping that I definitely do not miss).Consequently, the CD version is considerably more melodic and listenable than its harsher predecessor.
Notably, one of the new pieces (the 20-minute "Or") now opens the album, which dramatically transforms its overall feel and trajectory."Or" does contain some elements of the now-deleted piece from the pink record though, as it eventually locks into a similarly heaving and metallic pulse.However, it is considerably more compelling in other ways, as it undergoes significant transformation over the course of its journey, slowly building from simmering tension and hallucinatory feedback drift into a massive, churning mindfuck.It is followed by the brief and delightful "The" (plucked from the pink record), which unfolds as warm and bubbling reverie of shivering and shimmering synth-like loops.In classic Stapleton fashion, however, that pleasant interlude ends abruptly to make way for the album's most relentlessly and obsessively sanity-destroying piece ("Fall"), which mercilessly jabbers in a locked-groove style loop for almost 20 punishing minutes.It basically sounds like a room full of shuddering and puttering old engines, but with an uneasy "squirming" element thrown into the cacophony as well.Naturally, that piece ends in jarring and abrupt fashion as well, but it unexpectedly gives way to the surprisingly understated and composed-sounding "Of," which kind of resembles a German Expressionist Horror twist on jazz. It is a truly inspired and disturbing piece, as it feels like it was once something quite melodic but has since been slowed and stretched into a curdled and reverberant abstraction.It calls to mind an imaginary film noir in which the requisite seductive chanteuse is performing in a smoky nightclub, except that everyone and everything is slowly rotting and melting and all the sounds are smearing queasily together.
The second disk also opens with an entirely new piece ("The") and it is another interesting one, as it feels like a considerably less disturbing extension of the previous "Of."Instead of distending and smearing into a phantasmagoric hellscape, however, its foundation of lurching and stammering slow-motion percussion gradually blossoms into a meditative haze of buzzing string drones and gently pulsing, rippling guitar chords.At times, it almost sounds too sun-dappled and benignly psychedelic to be a Nurse With Wound piece, but it also sometimes sounds like a rehearsal tape of Barn Owl/Calexico-style desert rock being played at the wrong speed.The following "Eye" then makes a triumphant return to the "nightmare jazz" aesthetic of "Of," which is the aesthetic niche where Trippin’ Musik truly shines.In fact, "Eye" is easily one of the strongest pieces on the album, unfolding as a spacious and heady swirl of flickering, time-stretched female voices and flanged metallic swells.It evokes the sensation of being lured into a hallucinatory forest of swaying metal trees by some kind of half-malevolent/half-seductive forest nymph, which is a stylistic niche that certainly warrants further exploration.
The remaining two songs seem to the ones from the green vinyl, albeit in remixed and altered form.Both are among the finest pieces on the album, though they take very different directions.For example, "OF" essentially unfolds like a complex and multilayered 20-minute loop, but it is a remarkably hypnotic and absorbing one, as snatches of vocals warble and flutter inside a mechanized, churning pulse that is slightly out of phase.The closing "Sound," on the other hand, actually sounds like the work of a tight, focused, and unexpectedly melodic band.It is quite a lovely piece and is all the more striking for how nuanced, deftly arranged, and purposeful it feels, as it has an actual groove and a lazily burbling and shifting melodic figure.More importantly, it is allowed to run its entire course without being pulled apart, mangled, and dragged into darker, uglier territory.
I would be curious to know what led Stapleton to make the vinyl and CD versions of this album so different, as it genuinely seems like the latter is a punched-up and improved release rather than just the same album with added material thrown in.When I first listened to the vinyl edition, I actually found myself somewhat mystified that this album had taken so long to make, as the pink record just seemed like two abrasive loops stretched out for 20 minutes each. Given Andrew Liles' extreme work ethic, that seems like something that could have been knocked off in a single afternoon.Now that the whole album has been rearranged, enhanced, and re-edited, however, Trippin’ Musik feels like a considerably more coherent and focused statement.In fact, I think it could have been one of NWW's stronger albums if it had been edited even more aggressively than it was, though I imagine the allure of releasing an attention-grabbing triple LP epic was impossible to resist.I certainly was not immune to the appeal of that approach myself and can find plenty to like about both versions of the album.However, Trippin’ Musik could have easily been an album that I absolutely loved if it had been paired down to just "Of," "Eye," and "OF" (with "Sound" possibly throw in as a chaser).That said, I am about forty years too late if I want to convince Steven Stapleton of the (financially ruinous) merits of being much more selective in what he releases.Embracing imperfection and indulgence is inherently part of being a life-long Nurse With Wound fan, as the occasional rewards are usually worth it.They certainly are in this case, as Trippin’ Musik fitfully shows that Steven Stapleton and his collaborators are just as capable as ever at conjuring up distinctive and radical sound art unlike that of anyone else.
Originally composed by Maggi Payne between 1984-1987 for the performance group Technological Feets. Formed by video artist Ed Tennenbaum in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1981, the group combines dance, live video processing and music.
Ahh-Ahh was first released in 2012 on Root Strata. Composed on an Apple II computer & various early sampling devices, Payne's compositions are a vibrant response to the call from the moving body. Populated with buoyant pulses, graceful analogue swells, dense fog-like drones and cascading rhythms that shift in space, Ahh-Ahh is a vital document of not only these early collaborations, but of computer based music as well. She studied with many greats in the field, including Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley & David Berhman.
Fully immersive electronic music by US composer Maggi Payne, inspired by the arctic winds. Maggi Payne's sound worlds invite the listeners to enter the sound and be carried with it, experiencing it from the inside out in intimate detail. The sounds are almost tactile and visible.
The music is based on location recordings, with each sound carefully selected for its potential—its slow unfolding revealing delicate intricacies—and its inherent spatialization architecting and sculpting the aural space where multiple perspectives and trajectories coexist. With good speakers, some space in your schedule, and a mind-body continuum willing to resonate with Payne’s electroacoustic journey, but then it will take you to places that other music can’t reach.
From the sounds of dry ice, space transmissions, BART trains, and poor plumbing she immerses the listener in a world strangely unfamiliar. Maggi Payne is a composer, video artist, recording engineer, photographer, and flutist and is Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music and a faculty member at Mills College, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Laurin Huber is a prolific figure in the Swiss underground for experimental music and arts. He has been active as a musician and producer in a slew of projects like Wavering Hands, Frederik or legendary Swiss institution Krankenzimmer 204. Having just released his first solo release under the R.E.R. moniker on the label Edipo Re, co-founded by Huber and frequent collaborator Rolf Laureijs in 2016, he now presents his first album under his given name.
Thematically, Juncture is perfectly in line with Huber’s approach of thinking globally and acting locally. Highlighting the singularity of specific musical concepts while embedding them firmly in a collaborative network has been the crucial guiding principle in his work for Edipo. The four tracks on Juncture aim to work with "superimpositions, interactions, interferences and modes of co-existence," as Huber explains. "I'm generally interested in thought that tries to look at the world beyond dualisms," says the artist. "Contemporary feminist theory and philosophies of difference, the critique of dualities such as nature/nurture, body/mind, object/subject or anorganic/organic are therefore important reference points."
On a musical level, this means working with overlaps and interfering layers, field recordings as well as synthesizers and the experienced drummer's knack for intricate rhythms. Over the course of more than half an hour, the producer brings together dreamlike synthesizer pieces with stripped down mid-tempo techno pieces, feverish echoes of industrial music and swelling sounds that are juxtaposed with subtle rhythmic counterpoints. In a world in which dualities reign and polarization increases both socially and culturally, Junction serves as an invitation to deconstruct binary thinking by affirming the coexistence of allegedly opposed elements. It does so with striking emotional ambiguity, sometimes lulling in its audience with soothing sounds and in the next challenging them with an ominous atmosphere.
Ellen Fullman began developing The Long String Instrument in her St. Paul, Minnesota studio in 1980 and moved to Brooklyn the following year. Inspired by composer and instrument builder Harry Partch, Fullman's large-scale work creates droning, organ-like overtones that are as unique in the world of sound as her vision of the instrument itself.
Along with her 1985 debut album – appropriately titled The Long String Instrument – Fullman's only output in the 1980s would be two self-released cassettes, In The Sea and Work For Four Players And 90 Strings, recorded in 1987 at an unfinished office tower in Austin, Texas. This double LP collection features music from both cassettes as well as a previously unreleased piece from 1988 at De Fabriek in Den Bosch, Holland.
Ethereal and exquisitely paced, these rare recordings capture minimalism's quiet radiance. Within a musical landscape that has seen the rise of contemporary drone practitioners like Ellen Arkbro and Kali Malone, Fullman is sure to find a legion of fans.
Superior Viaduct is honored to present this long overdue archival release that marks a particularly vibrant period of Fullman's pioneering and timeless work.
Diamanda Galás' debut album The Litanies of Satan, originally released on Y Records in 1982, is reissued on the artist's own Intravenal Sound Operations label in LP, CD and digital formats. The album has been meticulously remastered from the original Y Records analogue tapes by Diamanda and engineer Heba Kadry and features the original classic artwork of that release. Vinyl includes poster.
This the first release in a new reissue campaign since Diamanda regained ownership and control of her entire catalogue in 2019.
-"The Litanies of Satan" (from the poem by Charles Baudelaire) Devotes itself to the emeraldine perversity of the life struggle in Hell.
-"Wild Women with Steak-Knives" (from the tragedy-grotesque by D. Galás "Eyes Without Blood") Is a cold examination of unrepentant monomania, the devoration instinct, for which the naive notion of filial mercy will only cock a vestigial grin.
It would be misleading to describe the opening "Molocular Meditation" as "noise," but it would probably be even more misleading to describe it as anything resembling music in the conventional sense.Instead, it would be more apt to characterize it is a mechanized and lysergic maelstrom or like a complex public address system prone to frequent disruptions and malfunctions. In more practical terms, it feels like several disparate motifs were loosely stitched together and mingled with improvisational flourishes that embellish Smith's playfully hammy and disjointed pronouncements.The overall effect is quite an unusual one, as the piece repeatedly seems like it is poised to cohere into a structured melodic or rhythmic framework only to collapse again or get blasted with a torrent of harsh static.Throughout it all, it is difficult to tell exactly what St. Werner is attempting to do or whether or not he is succeeding, as the blurting, unpredictable electronics often feel more like an intrusion than an enhancement: the piece sounds just fine when Smith's voice is accompanied by only a quiet hum or no sound at all.
Naturally, Smith's own contributions are frequently entertaining and endearingly wrong-footing, as he unpredictably bounces between welcoming me to the installation, providing meticulously detailed breakdowns of his availability on Thursdays, and making cryptic pronouncements like "the disclaimer is always the first martyr" or "the word 'fantastic' is obscene."As a result, I cannot help but imagine a more effective piece in which St. Werner just stuck to expanding upon one of his more promising themes and devoted the rest of his efforts to layering and processing Smith's vocals. That said, this album was not the context that "Molocular Meditation" was created for, so maybe the piece's erratic, shifting nature was perfect for its original "light and sound environment."In any case, it is a deeply bizarre and difficult-to-grasp piece, but it does contain some weirdly beautiful and poetic moments.
The album's second half consists of two short pieces that feature Smith and one longer one ("On The Infinite Of Universe And Worlds") that does not.All are considerably more linear and conventionally structured than the title piece, but it would still be a stretch to describe them as proper songs.That said, I suppose "Back to Animals" has at least a distant kinship to Von Südenfed, as Smith delivers a monologue over a dense and semi-consistent rhythmic pulse featuring some spectral hints of a melodic hook and a chord progression.However, it also shares a good amount of the title piece's unpredictability and precariousness, as the skittering, clattering rhythm always seems like it is about to derail.Von Südenfed is more explicitly referenced with the closing "VS Cancelled," which is essentially just a morbidly entertained Smith reading an email from Domino about their decision to drop that project (albeit over a shifting bed of gurgling electronics and clanking metal). The Smith-free "On The Infinite Of Universe And Worlds," on the other hand, is a fairly focused and substantial piece.Clocking in around twelve minutes, it is curiously billed as an "electronic opera based on Giordano Bruno's Renaissance writings," though it lacks just about every characteristic that I normally associate with opera (singing, characters, plot, lengthy duration).It certainly is a likable piece, however, as it is built upon a semi-linear and consistent foundation of skipping pulses that is gradually disrupted and pulled apart en route to a crescendo of a man shouting in Italian (presumably not Bruno himself, given the notorious lack of high-end recording equipment in sixteenth century Europe).
For the most part, I genuinely enjoy most of this album even if I cannot pretend to understand what St. Werner was thinking when he made it.While I would not necessarily describe it as "a mixed bag," it is a weirdly fragmented release with a very hazy unifying aesthetic.For example, the title piece would make some sense to me if this was an unusually experimental Mark E. Smith album that brought in St. Werner as a collaborator.This is Jan St. Werner album though.It also does not seem like there is any ambitious concept driving this album, nor does it seem like much of St. Werner's top shelf, cutting-edge material made it into these songs.Again, that would sense if the music was intended as mere backdrop or frame for Smith’s entertaining monologues, but the music is loud and intense enough to compete for my focus.Thankfully, that is not a fatal flaw, as Smith was such an amusing and iconic presence that even disjointed snatches of his voice punctuated by eruptions of noise are absorbing enough to carry an album.Perhaps St. Werner intuitively understood that and decided to make Molocular Meditation interesting by mangling and disrupting something what could otherwise have been a predictable and straightforward delight.Which, of course, feels like a weirdly apt decision for a Mark E. Smith tribute: anything less than the caustic, the messy, and the inscrutable would an affront to everything that Smith stood for.
If someone had told me twenty years ago that Cerberus Shoal would someday evolve into a '60s girl group-style family band, I probably would have thought that I had fallen asleep and was having an extremely weird and perplexing dream. Nevertheless, that improbable future has now come to pass with Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream?, which is Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin's first album to feature their daughter Quinnisa as a full member of the band. As befits such an auspicious occasion, Skeleton Dream is an especially fun and ambitious anomaly within the already unpredictable Big Blood discography. While I am hesitant to describe any release by this long-running Portland, Maine project as a "party album," such a classification would not be terribly wide of the mark here, as this release is comprised almost entirety of hooky, retro-minded pop songs. Characteristically, however, Skeleton Dream's appeal runs quite a bit deeper than a mere collection of entertaining classic pop pastiches, occasionally catching me off-guard with some wonderfully haunting and darkly hallucinatory moments.
One primary characteristic of the '60s "girl group" milieu has always been the conspicuous lack of men (aside from those lurking behind the scenes), so it is appropriate and fitting that Caleb Mulkerin relegates himself to more of a background role for this album.While the songs are all strong enough to ensure that his decreased role does not feel like a liability, it is quite significant, as Mulkerin's ragged yelp has always been one of Big Blood's most endearing and distinctive features.Consequently, the introduction of Quinnisa as a new lead vocalist makes for quite a striking shift in tone, steering the band in sweeter, more unabashedly "pop" direction on songs like the bouncy, piano-driven "Real World" and lilting, bittersweet "Insecure Kids."On the opening, "Sweet Talker," however, Quinnisa's trebly, distorted vocals sound somewhere between those of her mother and some Motown-era soul belter.Given that this is a Big Blood album, however, each member ultimately winds up filling a number of different roles, so Quinnisa also surfaces throughout the album as a drummer, trombonist, guitarist, and bassist.She does appear one more time as a lead vocalist on the album's most leftfield surprise though, as Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream? ends with a surprisingly reverent and straightforward duet performance of "Ave Maria."Recording unexpected and eclectic cover songs has become something of a Big Blood tradition in recent years, but I was still a bit blindsided to see Franz Schubert joining the ranks of Silver Apples, Missy Elliot, Bob Seger, Lloyd Cheechoo, and The Cure. 
The best pieces on the album, however, tend to be those that do not stray quite so far from Big Blood's usual fried, psych-damaged twist on Americana.My favorite is "Heaven or South Portland," which surrounds its darkly melancholy pop center with a lush, hallucinatory swirl of harmonium drones, wailing backing vocals, and woozy trombone melodies.I am also quite fond of the album's other harmonium-driven piece ("Pox"), which inventively appropriates the "You are sleeping, you do not want to believe" sample from The Smiths' "Rubber Ring" as a chorus hook for something that resembles a hallucinatory sea-shanty sung by a Siren.That is weirdly appropriate, given the phrase's original source: a flexi-disc that accompanied a 1971 book on ghosts and electronic voice phenomena.While I tend to prefer the stranger fare in general, some of the album's "classic pop" concoctions are weighty enough to make an impact as well, as Colleen Kinsella is too much of a force of nature to ever fit comfortably into a hooky, straightforward pop song (no matter how melodically and structurally conventional the rest of the song might be).For example, the otherwise bouncy and upbeat "Providence" is beautifully eclipsed and elevated by the soulful, sharp-edged intensity of the vocals.The underlying music also features some cool twists at times, as the conventionally pretty "Sugar" is nicely enhanced by twanging, sliding guitars and killer backing vocals, resembling something that would be perfectly at home in the half-innocent/half-lurid universe of David Lynch.
Notably, the album takes its title from a recording of Quinnisa as a small child in which she proclaims that her favorite thing to do before bed is "have a skeleton dream."That recording fittingly opens the album and feels like a weirdly apt summation of the album's aesthetic: the whole thing feels kind of dreamlike and tinged with darkness, but it is ultimately quite a fun place to be.And if I wanted to go one step further with a labored metaphor, I could even say that Big Blood have conjured up an alternate reality in which the corpse of pre-rock n’ roll pop music has been reanimated in delightful and non-terrifying fashion.In any case, I certainly did not expect to like this album nearly as much as I do, as I am very much burned-out on '50s and '60s pop and generally averse to "genre tourism" indulgences, yet Big Blood have managed to strike the perfect balance between weirdness, homage, songcraft, and art.Even if I do not love every song, Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream? is a remarkably coherent, effective, and listenable departure that never errs far enough in any direction to break the perfect spell.Moreover, Quinnisa's inclusion brings some additional light, joie de vivre, and playfulness to this project without sacrificing much in the way of gravitas.Admittedly, Big Blood were hardly hurting in that regard before, as Kinsella and Mulkerin's passion and humor has always been evident and this project has always been an obvious labor of love for their family.Still, heightening some of the most appealing aspects of the band can only be a good thing.I like this album quite a lot: it may not be a particularly representative album within Big Blood's wonderful oeuvre or feature an unusually high number of instant classics, but it is nevertheless one of their strongest, tightest, and most focused statements to date.
Longform Editions, the Sydney-based collective for deep listening begins 2020 with its 12th edition, once again featuring four diverse artists creating immersive experiences in sound composition attuned to ideas of deep listening. Now featuring 48 artists in total, Longform Editions has become a space for exploration: for the pure aesthetic of sound, reclamation of time and concentration. Longform Editions seeks to offer a way to navigate the overlap between physical experience and digital space.
We’re excited to present new work from Berlin-based Australian Jasmine Guffond, prior to her upcoming full-length on legendary label Editions Mego. Her heady, fascinating Current Harmonics mimics the motion of falling water using frequencies generated by the electricity powering a hydroelectric dam:
"Deep Listening for me is to focus uniquely on sound, and thereby on the moment. Akin to an alternate state of consciousness perhaps not unlike forms of meditation"
Feted by Pitchfork as "standard-bearers of globe-trotting ambient and psychedelic techno," long-running Belgian collective Pablo’s Eye contribute Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien, a trance-inducing meditation on urban observation through the work of writer Georges Perec's vision of Paris:
"The city with its social life can be perfect for a deep listening experience . . . the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually absorbs it all"
Botany is the recording project for Austin-based producer Spencer Stephenson, refracting his sound collages through psychedelic folk, spiritual jazz, kosmische. His Fourteen 45 Tails records and loops the final downbeat of 14 thrift shop-bought singles into a mesmerizing tapestry that muses on our perceptions of time and finality through sound:
"Fourteen 45 Tails is made out of the final moments of fourteen records that once belonged to people who’ve long since lived - or from another perspective may still be living - their own final moments."
Finally, Florida's Josh Mason’s gorgeous, searching ‘Aumakua makes for a very personal reflection, amplified into universal themes of family and loss. With his trademark poise and nuance, Josh traces a spiritual line around the life and death of his grandparents, lifting their memory out of the cold reality the end of existence often signals. ‘Aumakua is the interrelation of sound and listening to foster profound connection:
"Extended and intimate time with sound, either internal or external, allows one to sidestep the juggernaut of frenetic activity in modern life. Immersive listening can broker trades of emptiness for enrichment; isolation for connection."
Hidden in plain sight, grinning through worry, living in insecurity – modern society has returned to a day-by-day race for survival. To be vulnerable is the new normal; afraid, a bare minimum. Something was bound to emerge from the quiet throngs of the new precariat, and Racine is such a voice, setting to music those modern lives defined by uncertainty.
Quelque Chose Tombe ("Something Falls") is a set of compositions that confronts demons both inner and outer head-on. Created during a period of necessary unemployment somewhere in Montreal – caring for one's health can take precedence over work – the music is both a grotesque dance of the goblins and the gentle opiatic breath of the protectors. It's a harrowing reflection of the prevalent vampiric hypochondria forcing a generation into fatigue.
The sounds crawling out of Racine speak with their own internal logic. Snippets of fractured tunes creak through perturbed post-digital soundscapes, blurred and fragmented along the way into haunting amorphous instrumentals. The two-part title track is multi-part sonic maze where raven-like pitch-bent notes gather, a broken rave theme punctures its way through bass fog, and silence clefts the music in two, ushering in a coda of heartbroken ambience. As the album's suite progresses, Racine shepherds mutant melodic themes in and out of earshot, like clear thoughts bringing temporary order to a state of emotional panic and withdrawal. A host of other sounds too – voices and birdsong, cybernetically deformed – populate Racine's scarred productions.
Emerging from Quelque Chose Tombe’s constant darkness however, is a latent sense of hope. Racine is turning modern vulnerability into a strength, creating a singular aesthetic to reflect and confront an uncomfortable present.
Both Ryoko Akama and Anne-F Jacques have large discographies focusing on the creation of music with improvised and constructed devices based on everyday objects, so working together makes perfect sense. The two live collaborations Evaporation is comprised of feature the duo blending the methodologies of live performance and art installation, with the self-guiding objects manipulated in real time as the two move about the performance space while adjusting the objects and mixing the sound. The resulting recordings are two unique, yet complementary long-form works that, while difficult at times, are captivating throughout.
Recorded at two consecutive performances during the duo’s Winter 2018 tour, there are notable similarities, as well as differences, between the two pieces.Both are of equal length and using many of the same home-built idiosyncratic instruments, but the performance and the interactions of the two artists differ greatly.The combination works since there is a clear cohesion from one half of the tape to the other via the mechanical sound generators, but it is the human element that creates the most distinct variations.
The New York performance comes across as the more structured and composed one.After a brief passage of incidental "warming up" noises, looped almost-scraping like bits lead off, paired with the ringing of what sounds to be miniature bells or chimes.The source of these sounds is anything but clear, but they link together in their own sense of rhythm.Other elements are blended in by the duo, including additional ringing bells and a crackling/rattling bit that almost resembles popcorn or bubble wrap.Once electronic tonal sounds are blended in, including a rather harsh alarm tone; things turn towards darker spaces before drifting off.
Comparably, the Boston performance has a slower start, with an extended bit of object clattering and movement before the work begins properly.When it does, there is a notable amount of what sounds like equipment rolling around and an overall a looser feel to the performance.The approximated rhythms and repetition are not quite as prominent, and instead there is a greater presence of chaos.Random instrument sounds seem to pop up all around, and the whole piece feels more incidental than planned.The alarm type tone from the New York performance is here and pushed to the front, and the sharp, shrill character gives the whole piece a slightly more confrontational edge.
Home built devices and electronic experimentation may not make for the easiest of listening experiences, but Ryoko Ayama and Anne-F Jacques combine these two elements in an especially compelling way.I was most fascinated by the distinctly different character between the two performances despite them being only around 24 hours removed from one another.The first half captures the structured approach and the musicality of their distinctly un-musical instrumentation, while the second comes across less about composition and more about the full exploration of sound.The two performances complement each other perfectly and paired together makes for a fascinating, if occasionally challenging, tape.
Originally released back in 1989 on the New Albion label, this landmark celebration of extreme natural reverb has finally received a long-deserved reissue in honor of its thirtieth anniversary. Obviously, production technology has evolved quite a lot since the '80s and site-specific performances have since become a somewhat common occurrence in the experimental music world, so Deep Listening does not feel quite as radical now as it did when it was first released. Nevertheless, it is still quite a strange and magical album, as I cannot think of any other accordionists who have descended into a two million gallon cistern to explore the incredible acoustic possibilities inherent in a 45-second reverb decay. As someone without a deep technical understanding of how reverb works, I found the new liner notes from recording engineer Al Swanson and Peter Ward quite helpful in explaining exactly why these recordings feel so unreal, but such knowledge is not necessary to appreciate this album: I have been able to enjoy the epic and eerie slow-motion beauty of Deep Listening for years without knowing a single goddamn thing about phase integrity or slap-back. While I cannot say I was exactly clamoring to see this album released in the vinyl format, I am absolutely delighted to see it resurrected and back in the public consciousness.
For some reason, my mind has proven extremely resistant to viewing Deep Listening as anything other than a Pauline Oliveros album.Obviously, she is the most famous and influential member of this trio, as well as the artist most closely associated with "deep listening" as a kind of philosophy, but it would be more accurate to view this album as both the birth of Deep Listening Band and the beginning of a long, fruitful creative partnership with composer Stuart Dempster.In fact, it is Dempster's trombone and didgeridoo playing that most prominently sets the tone for the album's two most memorable pieces: the bookends "Lear" and "Nike."To some degree, that suggests "shallow listening" on my part, as Oliveros's subtly shifting bed of lingering accordion tones is crucial in shaping the subtly hallucinatory and harmonically rich backdrop in "Lear."Nevertheless, it is the deep, roiling drone of the didgeridoo that gives the piece its heft and it is the slow, majestic trombone melody that evokes its distinctively timeless and somber feel.That melancholy and vaguely medieval-sounding aesthetic is apt, as "Lear" was incorporated into Lee Breuer's production of King Lear (though I do not know if it was originally composed with that in mind)."Nike," on the other hand, is a bit more abstract and inventive, as it gradually takes shape from a ghostly miasma of voices, clattering metal pipes, and breathy conch shell drones.Admittedly, it takes a little while to fully come together, but it is a quite a bizarre and compelling piece nonetheless, resembling an angelic choir in a desolate factory that gradually curdles into an infernal-sounding crescendo that calls to mind an ancient battlefield littered with corpses (or at least a banshee caught in a thunderstorm).  
Between those two poles, there are a pair of more subtle and nuanced pieces: "Suiren" and "Ione."For the most part, "Ione" is kind of a beatific and meditative inversion of the palette employed for "Lear," as the didgeridoo and accordion converge into a languorously undulating bed of shifting harmonies.More importantly, Dempster's trombone melodies are not at all portentous and blood-soaked, instead lazily unfurling like smoke in something approximating a major key.It is not a bad piece by any means, but "Suiren" is considerably more compelling and is arguably the one piece that most fully captures the transformative alchemy of the cistern's unique acoustics. Aside from an unconventionally employed garden hose, Oliveros, Dempster, and Peter Ward completely abandoned their formidable arsenal of instruments, seashells, and metal pipes to see what they could achieve solely with the sound of their voices.As it turns out, they could achieve quite a lot, as "Suiren" unfolds as a phantasmagoric fog that lies somewhere between Gregorian chant and time-stretched Tuvan throat-singing.It is quite a hauntingly lovely piece and also a comparatively quiet one, which makes it the arguably the one that benefits the most from deep listening (there are no dramatic motifs to steal the focus away from its nuances).It is also very effective illustration of one of Ward's observations about the acoustic character of the space: aside from the long decay, the smooth and pure nature of the cistern's reverb "makes it impossible to tell where the performer stops and the reverberation takes over."
Another illustrative piece is "Balloon Payment," one of the three bonus tracks that Important has added for their reissue: it is nothing more than the sound of a balloon being popped, leaving roughly 45 seconds of rumbling reverberation in its wake.It is admittedly kind of a throwaway piece that only needs to be heard once, but the other two newly added songs ("Phantom" and "Geocentric") are an inspired curatorial inclusion, as they broaden the album's mood palette and end Deep Listening on a considerably brighter note than the war-like intensity of "Nike."Notably, all three new pieces were taken from Deep Listening Band's The Ready Made Boomerang (1991), which was recorded in the same cistern with a somewhat expanded ensemble.I suspect that means Important has no plans to reissue that album and that decision makes sense: the primary appeal of Deep Listening is that it was a cool idea and a fascinating process: trying to unravel the blurry relationships between sounds and their lingering afterimages makes for a very absorbing listen.It was a great experiment and statement of intent, but Dempster and Oliveros did not need to repeatedly collaborate with that same cistern once they learned its acoustic secrets.Moreover, these pieces are far from the best that Dempster and Oliveros have recorded together, as Important's previous Deep Listening Band reissues capture the pair in significantly more sophisticated and refined form.As such, Deep Listening is unquestionably a significant and influential album, but it should be appreciated as the initial creative breakthrough that led to even better things rather than something akin to a stand-alone crown jewel in Oliveros's discography.